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At Cannes, a Past Winner From Iran Ventures to Japan

By DENNIS LIM

Published: May 24, 2012

CANNES, France -- When the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, right, was last at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago he brought one of his more crowd-pleasing efforts, ''Certified Copy,'' a two-hander set in Tuscany and his first film with a movie star (Juliette Binoche, who won the festival's best-actress prize). Mr. Kiarostami is back this year with another film shot outside Iran: the Japanese-language ''Like Someone in Love,'' about the enigmatic, subtly shape-shifting relationship between a young woman and an old man in Tokyo. This time the reception has been quite different.

Amid familiar Kiarostami themes like mistaken identity and role-playing, the film sustains an aura of opacity and mystery that left some bewildered and others enthralled at the press preview on Sunday -- up until an abrupt ending that prompted some loud boos. The reception was much warmer at the official screening on Monday, and the movie is still being talked about as a contender for the top prize, given Mr. Kiarostami's track record (a festival regular, he won the Palme d'Or in 1997 for ''Taste of Cherry'') and the avowed admiration of this year's jury president, the Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti (who made a short about opening Mr. Kiarostami's classic ''Close-Up'' at his Rome cinematheque).

Speaking in Farsi through a translator and wearing his trademark sunglasses, Mr. Kiarostami discussed his new film in an interview with Dennis Lim. Edited excerpts from the conversation follow. (His first two responses contain mild spoilers about the film's final shot.)

Q. A lot of people here are talking about the ending of your film, so it's worth noting that its original title was ''The End.'' Why did you first call it that?

A. When I was writing the script I wasn't thinking about a title. But then came this scene where the stone breaks the window. All of a sudden I wrote, ''The End,'' in English, and the version of ''The End'' that came to my mind was that of the title at the end of classic black-and-white American films, even down to the font. I'm not sure why I had this phrase and this image in mind, but I thought, O.K., this can be a temporary title and that shot would be a temporary ending. I sent the script to my translator and producer and expected them to tell me that this is not an end to the story, and if they had, I would have asked for time to find a better ending. But they didn't, and I gradually realized I was unable to add anything more.

Q. How did you settle on ''Like Someone in Love'' instead? We hear the Ella Fitzgerald song of that name at a pivotal moment.

A. When I started searching for music for the moment the girl enters the old man's apartment, it came naturally that as someone from my generation, he would listen to jazz. The first album I took off my shelf was Ella Fitzgerald and I just bumped into this song, ''Like Someone in Love,'' which I thought was a nicer title. Once I shot the actual ending I thought ''The End'' might lead to some misunderstanding, as if I meant that the character died.

The phrase itself sounds good to me, too. There is nothing determined and definitive about love. It's better to say that we are like someone in love rather than asserting that we are in love. Death or birth are definitive; love is nothing but an illusion. We have in this film four people who are like some people in love.

Q. There's a mystery that takes hold from the very first scene, in which there's an unseen speaker and it takes a while for us to figure out the context of the conversation.

A. I've said before that fortunately or unfortunately, I'm unable to be a real storyteller. I'm sure that we can never be the witness of a story from its beginning to its end. I would say that this film doesn't have an adequate opening and it doesn't have a real ending either, but it also proves my idea that all films start before we get into them and they end after we leave them.

Q. There are several scenes that take place in a car, your signature location, and you've talked about the pleasure of shooting in cars. Were there new challenges to filming driving scenes in Japan?

A. For one thing the driver [the 82-year-old actor Tadashi Okuno] didn't know how to drive, and the rules are also much stiffer in Japan than elsewhere. You can imagine how awful it was to make a road movie around Tokyo with an actor who doesn't know how to drive.